


sunken swords

by gogollescent



Category: The Lord of the Rings - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: F/F, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-18
Updated: 2015-07-18
Packaged: 2018-04-10 00:12:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,735
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4369742
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gogollescent/pseuds/gogollescent
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She raised one arm; the world ebbed. Éowyn was stranded on the shore.</p>
            </blockquote>





	sunken swords

There was an elf dancing alone beside the kings’ mounds. Her bare feet did not bend the grass, and by the light of the lanterns and tall upright torches her loose hair ran to amber – dark-hued gold.

Éowyn had left the mead hall with a half-formed intention of joining the people of Edoras, gathered around bonfires and cookpits on the hill. Faramir was there, somewhere, thanking old women copiously. She could hear rough voices turn in song.

But an elf, it seemed, need not scrounge for her music. Galadriel moved with straitened grace, quicker and slighter than the drumbeats – than any velvet antler-point of hidden sound. She raised one arm; the world ebbed. Éowyn was stranded on the shore.

*

Once she had feared to learn that the house of Eorl was lowly. She had glimpsed at a long misrule, backed by lust and force of arms; and their music, she thought, was the caroling of the brigand as he reaves.

That fear came back to her at a word from Gondor’s herald, who said king and queen and queen’s father’s people would ride along the western road to escort Théoden’s body. A pack of royal guests, Aragorn not the proudest? Before the war, Éowyn never thought or dreamt of elves – craving rather a death which hung low on the bough, and did not rise and rise out of hand’s reach – but she had dreamt _enough_ to know that they were proud. The greatest lords still left to Middle-earth. And though she had said she would make a healer, and love all living things, her first months home again had gone to earth and masonry; so she saw her own work tested, when the fair folk filled the hall.

But her dread went unanswered. The elves sat away on a dais with kings and ring-bearers, and their ancient splendor weighted the die of where she would look: sconces bent toward them as though eavesdropping, and the shadows ran out at their feet. But the hall, and her brother, and her loud heart were not diminished – no more than a wood is by the mountain that it robes.

In the same way, now, she took no pain from the fact of Galadriel’s beauty. There was just refreshment: a northern wind, let in through her defenses. Sent by a friend to show defenses’ flaw. It cleared the fog and reek of long enclosure; it said that Éowyn need not grow sick, alone.

As she was thinking all this she came closer, stepping around a black pool rimmed in bronze. There were chains of such pools on the grass, water and wine. The revelers had passed on.

“Ah!” said the Lady of the Wood, turning around. “You I know. You are a shade I recognize, hero of Pelennor!”

Éowyn bowed.

"Pelennor’s hero sleeps under your feet,” she said.

Galadriel sobered, seemingly. “Him, too,” she replied, and took Éowyn’s hand. “Do I overstep myself? I hope not. Your burial-grounds are beautiful. My people have few such places – though one green hill awaits me across waves.”

Not knowing what was spoken of, or whether doubt, or the surprising force of tears, was the hard thumb that pressed between her eyes, Éowyn said lightly: “I admit – When I saw you, there was a moment – Meriadoc has told me of the Barrow-downs outside the Shire. Almost, I thought you a fair wight.”

As soon as she had said it she wondered what insult she had coughed out. But Galadriel smiled. “Long-enduring, slow-withering – carapaced in mortal bones? Yes, I too have heard the tale. Yet I hope I am less cold.”

She squeezed Éowyn’s fingers in a grip like summer. “Will you partner me?”

“—for a dance…?”

“You’re the champion,” Galadriel said, drawing her into a plain pattern of steps. “It’s traditional.”

Éowyn found her footing. Whatever the words, Galadriel led; backward and forth under Théoden’s mound, a shuttle strung with floating motion. It was not that she had lost substance, linking hands with a story. Inside the crude armor of hips and ribs, she was buoyed up.

“Yes, I’ve presumed further, haven’t I?” Galadriel said, maybe in answer to her thoughts. “You know there was another reason that I recognized you. You have a look familiar to me – that of a woman lately tempted.”

“If tempted, I failed the test,” Éowyn said, with a smile.

She had failed twice with Faramir in the time between his arrival and the ceremony alone. What had Aragorn said in the hall? _It heals my heart to see thee now in bliss._ Yes: certainly. At least, she believed that a whirl of eagerness and pride might coalesce, in time, to something whole. There was bliss laid in the shallows of the evening – happiness, like the lapis-tiled bed of some white fountain, whose colors became beautiful when all the spume was stilled. But for the most part she had been too busy to count her moods, half-drowned in time.

“Not so,” said Galadriel. “I have been tempted a time or two myself. I speak with confidence in this.” She met Éowyn’s gaze. “Though I wonder if you would have perceived the lure.”

“Likely not,” Éowyn agreed, trying to imagine what a woman in her fourth Age could crave. Gossip about Béma himself? Pre-chewed waybread?

The clear eyes glittered. “But after all I think you must have understood the thing in part. For I wanted to be queen.”

Éowyn stumbled. Galadriel released her. She was aware of heat, and heat's flight, and shame that rose to warm her better than a stranger could.

“I desired no crown."

“I believe it. You are fair and strong and surpassingly young – why should you scrape for power?” There was a stain in red on the Lady’s cheek, and the prow of her white smile pierced it. “Power over the many, at least. And as for Estel—”

“I would not have had power over him.”

Galadriel’s expression dimmed. She became dispassionate; she was like Faramir considering the east. Had it been Faramir, then, who looked calmly at the Shadow?

“What then would you have won? Would you have followed him like the ghost of his forefather’s betrayer? Or like a living soldier, pleased to love and not to hold?”

“If he had granted it…”

“Granted? Here already we pass beyond the speech of liege and lord. If he had _granted_ it, you must have been other than a knight of his great company. You’d have him stoop to you.“

Éowyn shuddered, furious. Galadriel placed a hand on her shoulder, as to steady her.

“You think me deceived,” Éowyn said, slowly. “That I know not what scrapings I wished for, when I rode as a man. But, lady, I see my heart, if not from such a height."

"What do you see?"

She breathed the cut-open scents of wild grass and water.

“The Prince of Ithilien it was who first told me – that I loved the king as a boy loves his captain. He knew me then but a little. If I had been my brother, I could have loved Aragorn peaceably. But being cheated once, I thought to make the loss pay out: if a woman, why not a woman who could touch him? Even that seemed less than redress, set against the ill chance of my birth. A maiden of Rohan, of horse-lords, at the end of all things, without the strength to bear a shield…”

It was an old grief. The words went forward evenly, they had no home within.

“And still I would have had no hold on him,” she said, freeing the last of her hope; permitting it a good death in the open. “Neither rule of strength, nor bond of pity. Do you not know your grandson?”

Galadriel’s face sharpened as if someone, high up, tilted a mirror. She slid her hand down Éowyn’s shoulder, and where it went the cold and dead numbness revived, released from secret spaces in her tight-knit, simple flesh. Intensified to the point of pain, they washed out in the same moment: were followed, not with pure well-being, but by a ticklish burn.

One touch cored her arm. And yet it was made stronger, firmer, by a pith of air than bone.

“Yes. How strange,” Galadriel said, soft and elated, “to think that we are women.” She kissed Éowyn’s brow. Éowyn slipped away, and Galadriel reached to catch her; lowered her to earth, on her back, where she could see the stars. They were brighter now than all the cressets of the land; they charged her, falling spears, funneled toward her outline till the wind of their flight shook her heart. Yet none landed. None injured her, drove into her: they came but to sink through.

*

That night she dreamed of Gríma. He had shrunk beyond even the cringing smallness Mithrandir provoked in him; he was pale, solid and glossy, pitted as an egg. No longer did he seem to stain his setting, or extend fibrous roots through the dark. When she bent toward him, he rattled back in fear.

Théoden once said to her: he is the best and truest of my counsellors. Listen to him, Éowyn, an thou wouldst be wise.

In those days she listened to her people’s singing and felt her heart stir, less strongly than it had done in childhood, at the lilt and lace of twining speech; and at the net woven over her eyes by well-remembered bravery. But the idea came to her that a worm in the earth may believe its treasure bright, never meeting the sun. And she listened less to lays of glory, and of the richness of the land, and more to singers who spoke of death by treason, or valiant defeat; for such at least she felt she had a claim to. A man could die well, though he had stolen his sister’s dowry, and killed his king. She and every person born in the shadow of the age was promised to the field, and the sword – though maybe not to their own. She looked about her, through a skein of long hair. She touched soldiers, nags, crumbling hill forts, all of whom would perish with more honor than they’d lived.

When she woke she was pleased with herself for waking. It was not yet dawn, but the sky was bare; night, that old monster, had spat out its broken teeth.


End file.
